Description:

Under Jurisdiction torture isn’t about truth. It’s about terror.

The Jurisdiction’s Bench has come to rely on the institutionalized atrocities of the Protocols to maintain its control of an increasingly unstable political environment. When Andrej Koscuisko, a talented young doctor, reports to orientation as a Ship’s Inquisitor he will discover in himself something far worse than a talent for inflicting grotesque torments on the Bench’s enemies. He will confront a passion for the exercise of the Writ to Inquire whose intensity threatens to consume him utterly.

As he struggles to find some thread of justice and compassion under the Law, as he fights to hang on to what remains to him of his sanity, he will make powerful enemies who are eager to use his knowledge, his empathy, his passion against anyone who challenges the Bench.

At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Advance Praise for An Exchange of Hostages:

A grisly and absorbing work -- a truly disturbing exercise in psychological inquiry. Susan R. Matthews has envisioned her future society well....Matthews’ greatest achievement may well be the empathy she wins for both the avid abhorrence with which Koscuisko contemplates his own actions and the stricken loyalty with which the slaves assigned to him view himself. Other writers have approached these themes -- Gene Wolf and Elizabeth A. Lynn leap to mind -- but none to my knowledge have plunged the reader so deeply into them. Susan R. Matthews simply doesn’t flinch. In that, An Exchange of Hostages can stand comparison to Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed.
-Stephen R. Donaldson

A very intense novel. An absorbing and frightening character study...the more you learned about the situation these people were trapped in, the more horrifying it became....An extremely talented writer. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
-Martha Wells

Powerful, insidious, and insightful -- a singular accomplishment for a tenth novel, let alone a first.
-Melanie Rawn

Amazon.com Review

Andrej Koscuisko had graduated with the highest honors from the Mayon Medical Center and could have started a lucrative private practice. But his father had other plans for him, sending him to Fleet Orientation Station Medical where he will learn to become a Ship's Surgeon, a highly skilled torturer armed with the powerful Writ of Inquistion. Unable to escape his brutal training, Koscuisko will have to reconcile his natural empathy for the sick with a dark secret he will learn about himself. First-time author Susan Matthews demonstrates a sure hand and proves she's not afraid to take on a disturbing subject.

About the Author

After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology, Susan R. Matthews was commisioned into the United States Army, where she was the operations and security officer for a combat support hospital specializing in nuclear, biological, and radiological warfare. Currently working as an auditor for an aerospace manufacturer, Susan lives with her partner in Seattle, Washington.